Google Testing Four AdWords Ads Again

The whole SEM community is up in arms about Google testing four ads, AdWords ads, in the Google search results page. This is something Google has tested on and off for years and years. I think the earliest one I saw was four ads at the bottom of the results back in 2006 but nevertheless, it seems the tests have increased during the holiday shopping season this year.

Jennifer Slegg has many screen shots of seeing four ads in the Google search results. One of the more shocking ones is from Pete Meyers on Twitter where he shows four ads and Google's mortgage calculator, then maybe you can keep scrolling to see the organic results. Here is his picture:

goodroi from WebmasterWorld said he is not surprised by this, saying "Google is a business that is trying to make money. Imagine if someone was willing to pay for relevant content to appear on the top of your website and your users were satisfied with that paid content, you would probably let that person do it."

As you can imagine, the community is not happy about the organic results not being shown to most users with the four ad position. Three ads on mobile are enough, even two. But @andreapernici saw four ads on mobile, which means you need to scroll to see ad 3 and 4 for the most part. Forget even seeing the organic results.

I stitched together his two screen shots, since he was unable to take one and fit it all on one screen. Here is what it looks like on mobile to see four ads: